Michael Grossberg, who founded the LFS in 1982 to help sustain the Prometheus Awards, has been an arts critic, speaker and award-winning journalist for five decades.
Michael has won Ohio SPJ awards for Best Critic in Ohio and Best Arts Reporting (seven times).
He's written for Reason, Libertarian Review and Backstage weekly; helped lead the American Theatre Critics Association for two decades; and has contributed to six books, including critical essays for the annual Best Plays Theatre Yearbook and an afterword for J. Neil Schulman's novel The Rainbow Cadenza.
Among books he recommends from a libertarian-futurist perspective: Matt Ridley's The Rational Optimist & How Innovation Works, David Boaz's The Libertarian Mind and Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress.
Not everyone is familiar with the British-based Orwell Prizes, which recently announced their slate of 2026 finalists.
Sponsored and administrated by The Orwell Foundation in the United Kingdom, the prizes aim to recognize work that comes closest to George Orwell’s ambition “to make political writing into art.”
Orwell certainly achieved that goal with his most widely acclaimed and enduring novels Nineteen Eighty-Fourand Animal Farm, both later inducted into the Prometheus Hall of Fame for Best Classic Fiction. So it’s nice to see another award honoring Orwell’s spirit.
It’s relatively rare for a Prometheus-winning work of pro-freedom science fiction or fantasy to be adapted into a movie or for television. But that happened this year, with the recent 2026 release of an animated film of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, inducted in 2011 into the Prometheus Hall of Fame.
While the misconceived third film version of Orwell’s anti-authoritarian and anti-communist classic fable proved disappointing, our hopes remain high for more Prometheus-winning novels or stories to be filmed – and some are already in the works.
Meanwhile, sparked by this year’s film release, I asked Libertarian Futurist Society members I work with as fellow Best Novel judges which Prometheus-winning works they’d like to see on screen.
Adam Tuchman’s top choice is The Probability Broach, L. Neil Smith’s alternate-history SF novel that won the 1982 Best Novel award.
Of the many reviews of the flawed new film version of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, perhaps the most insightful is one that broadens its critique to examine Orwell himself.
Richard M. Salsman, an economist and visiting assistant professor of political economy at Duke University, goes deeper than most other writers in contextualizing Andy Serkis’ widely panned animated film version.
With disturbing clarity, Salsman explains how Orwell’s evolving views led him to reverse his initial conception of Animal Farm as a critique of capitalism – but also how the British democratic socialist remained faithful to some of his deepest underlying assumptions.
This is a powerfully illuminating review and essay that deserves to be read in full at The Daily Economy, a publication of the American Institute for Economic Research.
But I also want to highlight some of Salman’s key insights, because they are so relevant to the themes and world view that shape the Prometheus Awards.
Patience can be a virtue – especially when it comes to nominations for the Prometheus Hall of Fame.
Not all works that become Hall of Fame finalists or winners do so in the first year that they are nominated. But that’s never a permanent obstacle to recognition, because in this annual Prometheus category, Libertarian Futurist Society members benefit from the luxury of time.
If at first a work is overlooked or doesn’t rank high enough to become a finalist, it can be nominated and renominated in future years.
It’s time to begin considering what’s worth nominating for potential induction into the next Prometheus Hall of Fame for Best Classic Fiction.
Even as Libertarian Futurist Society members are voting to select the 2026 Hall of Fame winner from the current slate of finalists, it’s not too early to nominate eligible works for the 2027 Hall of Fame.
Only LFS members have the right to nominate works for any category of the Prometheus Award. However, publishers, authors and other SF/fantasy fans and libertarians are welcome to contact us to make suggestions.
As a guide to Prometheus Awards voting, the Prometheus Blog has once again published full-length and in-depth reviews of each of this year’s five Best Novel finalists.
Whether Libertarian Futurist Society members read the reviews (which do contain a few spoilers) before, during or after reading the finalists themselves, the reviews are designed to illuminate and raise the visibility of each novel.
Other SF/fantasy fans and other libertarians, outside the LFS, also are invited to check out the reviews to better understand how they fit the distinctive dual focus of the Prometheus Awards on both quality and liberty.
Before he became best known to younger generations as Obi Wan Kenobi in Star Wars, British actor Alec Guinness was known in part for his comedies.
Guinness made his name in six Ealing Studios film comedies between 1949 and 1957, most notably playing eight characters in Kind Hearts and Coronets and lead roles in The Ladykillers, The Lavender Hill Mob and The Man in the White Suit. The latter film, released in 1951, has a deserved reputation as one of the great movie comedies of its era. It also happens to be both libertarian and individualist in its wry themes.
Not only that: The Man in the White Suit has an ingenious plot whose premise is clearly science fiction, making the film of even greater interest to the Libertarian Futurist Society.
Recognized in the Prometheus Awards as a classic for its cautionary libertarian theme about how power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts even the good, The Lord of the Rings has become one of the most popular and enduring works of modern fiction.
Yet, I hadn’t fully grasped until recently just how enduring and influential J.R.R. Tolkien and his bestselling works have become to modern culture.
So many books and articles analyzing Tolkien’s life and fiction have been published and continue to appear that the Tolkien Society, founded in 1969, is able to sustain annual awards with full slates of finalists in several categories.
A Pope has quoted a Prometheus-winning classic in an encyclical letter.
So far as I can tell, that seems to be a first.
Pope Leo XIV (Creative Commons license)
The American Pope Leo XIV has quoted the British author J.R.R. Tolkien in his latest papal encyclical, published May 15, 2026: “On Safeguarding The Human Person In The Time Of Artificial Intelligence.”
The Pope quotes a powerful and wise statement by Gandalf from The Return of the King, the third volume of The Lord of the Rings. Libertarian Futurist Society members inducted the trilogy in 2009 into our Prometheus Hall of Fame for Best Classic Fiction.
Jerry Pournelle, a science fiction writer who also was devoted to championing scientific progress and space development, dreamed of what’s now fast becoming a reality on and off the Earth.
Jerry Pournelle in 2005 (Creative Commons license)
Sparked by his enthusiasm over the recent successful SpaceX Starship v.3 launch, Instapundit columnist and American legal scholar Glenn Harlan Reynolds has written a heartfelt column paying tribute to the prescient vision of Jerry Pournelle.
Pournelle, a Prometheus Best Novel winner, deserves to be remembered – and not only for his fiction.
“When I was still a kid, I read Jerry’s column “A Step Farther Out” in Galaxy magazine religiously. Jerry saw it all coming: vertical takeoff and landing spaceships, the need to lower costs to orbit, and the absolute necessity for both reusability and launch volume to make things cheap enough, and reliable enough, to build an interplanetary economy,” Reynolds writes.
“He wrote about the immense resources of space (both in terms of energy and material), and the wide-open human future they could support. As the blurb for a collection of his work published in 2022 says, “If you wanted a strategy for the technology of going to space in the 1970’s, 80’s and 90’s, Dr. Jerry Pournelle was your man.”
Sponsored and administrated by The Orwell Foundation in the United Kingdom, the prizes aim to recognize work that comes closest to George Orwell’s ambition “to make political writing into art.”
